


Hurricane Nights

by scratchienails



Series: No Chance of Precipitation [6]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Small Town, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Character Death, Conspiracy, Giant Robots, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, Kamen Rider Zi-O AU because I can, M/M, Murder Mystery, Probably not for the faint of heart, References to Drugs, Thriller
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-04
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-01-04 15:29:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18346484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scratchienails/pseuds/scratchienails
Summary: Collection of Vrains AUs / Canon Divergence. Rest of Precipitation series not necessary.1) (1/4) The whole town is out to kill him. Takeru isn't going to let them.2) (1/?) Ryoken, apparently, is going to conquer the world someday. Or something. According to the assassin from the future trying to kill him, at least.





	1. let's give this small town the blues ( I )

**Author's Note:**

> I said I was gonna do it... and so I did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's note: This one was originally gonna be FS but I lost interest in that. Sorry guys!

A string of kidnappings in a small town isn't something easily forgotten, but at seven years old, Homura Takeru starts to understand that everyone else desperately wants to. 

Maybe if it had been ordinary,  _mundane,_ just some creep snatching kids, things would have been business as usual. But there had been nothing ordinary or mundane about that week he and five others went missing, no matter what anyone says.

Takeru knows what he saw.

* * *

 

“Have you started to remember things a little more clearly?” Dr. Taki has her notepad in hand, a pen hovering over the paper. As if she needs to take notes on a conversation they’ve been having for years.

Of course, she does. She never listens to a word Takeru says, unless it can be conveniently twisted into different story: anger issues, delayed development, paranoia, memory distortions, dissociation. She would give him whatever symptoms she had to.

 _He’s just not getting better,_ she would no doubt tell his grandparents later. _We need to send him somewhere he can get better help. I know just the place._

He could say anything here, and only the damning would matter. Only what could be used to send him right to his execution. Just like Jin.

And just like Jin, if he got sent away, within months he’d be nothing more than a crumpled body on the concrete. Or maybe they’d smother him, like Miyu—no, he’d put up too much of a fight, even on tranquilizers. Slit his wrists, maybe. Have him slip in the shower or starve himself to death. The kind of shit the kids in town could mock his eulogy for. After they found a terrible little note in his pocket, of course: a miserable little message to complete the tragic little story of a broken boy that just couldn’t handle being alive.

But if he stayed, he might end up roadkill. Declared dead with shaking heads as they tugged him out from under a semi, just like that other kid.

Bad thoughts. Takeru takes a breath, trying to think around the pounding in his chest. Frustration burns inside his head, and builds like pressure in the back of his throat. “I know what I saw.”

“Of course.” Dr. Taki agrees blandly. “But these sort of _traumatic_ experiences—well, our minds have ways of warping them. We have to overcome that to get better.”

_You were just seeing things. All six of you were just seeing things. You were scared, and confused, and your testimony means nothing._

Nobody has ever said those words to him, but he can hear them in every single mouth.

So Takeru says nothing, and Dr. Taki hums. “Your grandmother is worried. She doesn’t think the medicine is working.” She watches his face with gray eyes. Her own face doesn’t move, and he imagines them both as porcelain dolls staring at each other, expressionless and empty. When he offers her nothing, she puts forward another prompt. “What do you think?”

He feels separated from his body, but at the same time, trapped in it. Blazing, his skin itches and burns, and he wants to tear at it, shred it into ribbons. There's an ache in his fingers, settled in at the base of his middle joint and he desperately wants to crack his knuckles. But Takeru can’t move; he can barely force open his mouth to reply, “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

“Talk to me.” Her voice is gentle, but he hates it. Hates the orange sheen of lipstick on her lips, of red in her hair. There’s something like a scream building up in the back of his throat. “Are you feeling better? Worse?”

“Better.” He answers. He can’t give her any openings. For a moment, they’re just looking at each other again. Takeru doesn’t think this is how psychiatry is supposed to work, but this is all he knows: this too small room, with thick curtains pulled tight over the windows and a door that locks automatically, and the scratch of Dr. Taki’s pen.

“I’m increasing the dosage.” Dr. Taki says with a note of finality in her voice, already writing on her script pad.

Takeru envisions the pills they gave him last time. Little white capsules in a yellow bottle with a label he spent hours googling. The results were innocuous, believable. He didn’t dare swallow a single one of them.

This will be the third time she’s increased the dosage this year. Numb, his mouth cracks open and words fall out. “Keep doing that and you’re going to kill me,” Takeru says, his voice sitting dry and sandy in his throat. Dr. Taki smiles and laughs cheerfully.

She doesn’t deny it.

* * *

 

He's not supposed to dump medicine or flush it down the toilet, he read once. It gets into the water, or something like that. So Takeru sells his pills to kids at the school. They think he’s on some crazy good drugs, and naturally want in. Takeru doesn’t correct them, but some distant part of him wonders if there’s a difference between poisoning the whole town, or just poisoning a couple kids.

Does he even really care?

Not really.

His morning ritual of cheating death done with, he grabs his jacket before heading downstairs.

“Another?” His grandmother’s voice carries the aghast tone that always accompanies something on the local news. Takeru pulls his jacket on as he slouches into the kitchen. His grandparents are hunched over the tiny TV on the counter, watching channel 7. On the screen, a house is black and scorched.

“That’s Sakura-san’s place, isn’t it?” Gramps asks. Gran nods, covering her mouth with a wrinkled hand. It used to be. Now it’s just a husk, faintly smoking.

“How many house-fires does that make now?” They wonder, voices suitably hushed as he pulls the milk out of the fridge and drinks straight from the carton.

The answer is too many, but nobody is going to point that out.

On the bottom of the screen, a newsreel rolls by.

The search for the missing boy is being called off, after just two days. Takeru shoves the milk back into place too forcefully, and a carton of cheese comes toppling out.

“Takeru!” Gran chides.

Just two days. Hell, that made it sound better than it was; it hadn’t even been forty-eight hours since Fujiki Yusaku was declared missing. Gone without a trace.

At least the others left behind bodies. Disappearing as if he never existed at all, everyone that was supposed to care giving up so easily—it seemed too messed up to be real, but it was.

He cleans up the stupid cheese, and tries not to imagine how Fujiki died. 

“I’m going to school.” He announces as he leaves, not listening for his grandparents' response. 

* * *

 

The thing about Fujiki’s disappearance is that nobody else seems bothered by it. Like Takeru’s the only one that stares out into the canyon and wonders what happened to him. It's not even like the two of them were close, because they weren't allowed to be. Different classes, different lunch periods—their interaction ever since they were six had been restricted to catching eyes as they passed each other in crowded hallways before being swept away in the current. _They_ couldn't have them talking, worsening each other's "delusions" or worsening their own "trauma", or worst of all, disrupting their already nebulous grasp on "reality". But no one else was close with Fujiki either; no parents, no relatives, no friends. If not for who Fujiki was and what he was involved with, he may never have been reported missing at all. 

But it isn’t like the general populace just didn’t give a shit, _oh no_ , because Takeru can see the way the grocer’s shoulders are a little more relaxed, the ease in the sheriff’s swagger as he marches around town, the glint in the pharmacist’s beady eyes as he filled Takeru's probably deadly prescription.

They’re relieved, Takeru figures, and his lips curl in disgust: relieved to finally be rid of one of the reminders, one of the black-eyed ghosts that haunted their little town where nothing was supposed to happen.

There’s just one left, then. It must seem easy, with five already down and accounted for. But Takeru has no intentions of going down easy. He picks up his training again, starts slicking back his hair and wearing leather. He glares and snarls at people in the street, knuckle-dusters gleaming on the tight ridges of his fingers just enough to catch eyes in the afternoon sun.

He’s fifteen and he’s not going to die here.

* * *

 

At night, he starts sleeping in his closet. It’s the kind of sliding door, wall-spanning affair common all across the county, so it’s easy to set up a sleeping bag on the floor inside. Each night, after locking the doors and windows and closing the blinds as tight as they can go, he shuts off the light and silently slips inside. 

No one can know that he sleeps there. Not even his grandparents. If _they_ come, _they_ will find an empty room with an empty bed. The ruse won't last for long, but he will have the jump on them, at the very least.

It has to be enough.

He won’t let them make him disappear too.

Except, _except_ , there’s something different about the last disappearance. He spends a lot of time thinking about it. Everyone does. The initial period of relaxation has slipped them by, and people are starting to look a little anxious. Because, months come and go and nothing turns up: no convenient trail leading from the gas station, to deep in the woods, to an abandoned car, to a river. No notes alluding to suicide and drugs, no sudden reputation of clubbing and fucking and slipping off to the big city. No call from out of state: _we think we found the body._

Without a body, without the certainty of a corpse in a casket, Fujiki is more of a ghost than ever, hanging over their heads and lingering in rooms.

He got away, Takeru realizes one day. It’s a stupid, crazy thought, but it _feels_ right. Compelled by the baseless suspicion, he finds himself back to staring out across the ridges of the canyon, eyes straining for something that could prove him wrong with his heart in his throat. Going down there alone would be suicide, just setting himself up for an ambush, but he wants to do it.

It could be a set up. The whole thing. Just contrived bait to lure him out of the town center to somewhere where _they_ can put him down with much less fuss.

But there’s a chance that Fujiki is alive out there, somewhere. Maybe he was like Takeru, and kept and saved every spare coin and bill in a hidden jar, planning for the day he found a way out. Except Fujiki had been smarter than him, _is_ smarter than him, so maybe Fujiki had a better idea. Like—well, Takeru can't think of anything, but for the first time in years, he dares to hope. 

* * *

 

tbc.

 

 


	2. death by fortune cookie (1/?)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a Kamen Rider Zi-O AU absolutely no one on the planet asked for, or even expected, but I wrote anyway because I'm self-indulgent and do what I want. No knowledge of Zi-O, or Kamen Rider in general, necessary.
> 
> Wacky time travel hijinks commence!

Most of his days didn’t begin with a giant robot falling out of the sky and trying to kill him. In fact, this was the first time, discounting all his nightmares as a kid. Ryoken’s life was pretty ordinary, actually, for someone right out of highschool.

And then he walked into a Super Sentai episode or something, because a giant robot dropped in on his grocery run and tried to cut him in half with a sword the size of a surfboard.

“What the _actual_ fuck!” He gasped under his breath as he ran for his life, trying to ignore the sound of shattering concrete behind him.

“ _You won’t get away!”_ Someone’s voice rang through the air over an intercom, rising over the screams of terrified citizens.

The robot was as tall as a telephone pole and far more thick. Like a knight of legend, its armor gleamed in the bright sunlight, its joints anointed with glittering amethysts. It was sleek and fast and smooth, not at all like the clunky robots Ryoken sees in Youtube videos and mecha movies.

With a blast of heat, it was in front of him again, propelled on what could only be called thrusters on its legs—except that kind of technology shouldn’t have even _existed_.

More importantly, it was swinging that sword again, and Ryoken threw himself over the concrete, just barely managing to roll between the robot’s legs. His own legs were on fire and his run had long since become something of a desperate scramble, but he didn’t even think of stopping.

It was early morning, so most people weren’t out yet, but Ryoken didn’t consider that fortunate. If there had been crowds, he could try to blend in among them, but as things were the only people on the street ahead of him was a family with kids.

Not exactly the kind of people he wanted to get involved with the murderous sci-fi prop behind him.

Unfortunately, neither he nor they had much choice, as he heard a sound that was quickly growing familiar: the growl of the robot’s engines descending upon him.

Ryoken lunged sideways, aiming for the alleyway, but the family only registered the robot for a second before its charge had it practically on top of them. Sharp, sudden screams filled the air, and despite himself, Ryoken flinched, eyes clenched shut.

He didn’t want to see the result of what had to be at least a thousand kilos barreling into little kids and their mother. He forced himself to look, anyway, stomach dropping.

Only to find a very still robot and a group of terrified, but intact faces drained of all their color. The robot had frozen in place just in time to keep from running over anyone, and carefully took a step back away from the mother as she began to scream again.

“Cool robot…” Ryoken thought he heard one of the kids say, but there was no time to even wonder, as the robot’s head snapped to the side and immediately zeroed in on him.

Right. Running for his life.

The alley was fortunately too narrow for any giant robots, but that didn't stop it from leaping right into the air over the buildings on either side of him and trying to skewer him. All he could do was keep sprinting, knowing the alley would lead out on to the main street. As the giant's sword smashed down once more, missing him by a hairsbreadth, he stumbled out and shot left. There was the entrance to the mall he'd been aiming for, and he plowed through the automatic doors before they even had a chance to fully open. Inside, he didn't let himself slow down, no matter how much it felt like his legs were going to fall off. He kept going, looking around for a good place to hide. Most of the stores were already open but only sparsely populated, just fluorescent lights and bored employees. 

The mall had five floors of options, and absolutely no where to fit a giant robot. He rushed up an escalator and his eyes fell on an electronics shop, dimly lit by rows of glowing monitors showing scrolling landscapes.

As good a hiding spot as any.

Ryoken all but collapsed in the back of the store, surrounded by TVs. The employee wandering around had given him an odd look, but Ryoken waved him off and pretended like he was really interested in checking what kind of resolution each television got as he tried to regain his breath. His lungs were burning and he felt disgustingly sweaty, but the shop was cool and he didn't hear any screaming yet. 

Maybe everything was going to be alright.

"Excuse me, sir, can I help you find anything?" Someone, the employee probably, said, and Ryoken turned to wave him off again, just in time to see three things:

One, the employee had  _not_ been talking to him, but to a young man that had apparently just entered.

Two, said young man was very pretty. 

Three, said,  _said_ pretty young man had his fist buried in the employees gut.

There was a sort of sharp, crackling noise, and the employee groaned as he dropped like a sack of rice. Ryoken was turning to run before his brain fully caught up with the scene before him, but the stranger moved much faster than him. In an instant, there was what could only be called a gun in his face.

The young man was dressed in black and green, with a head of blue hair streaked with vibrant pink, and he held the gun very comfortably in his hand, with the barrel trained right on the tip of his nose. That was where people aimed for instant kills, Ryoken recalled distantly, from a movie he watched once. In order to hit the brain stem and keep the target from being able to even so much as twitch in resistance in their final moments.

That probably meant that this was the pilot of the murderous robot. Great.

Ryoken put his hands up and backed away slowly. The pilot took two steps forward for each of his back, the gun brandished and steady and very ready to kill him.

If he pulled the trigger, Ryoken really would be dead. Just like that. Holy shit, what a way to go. He couldn't believe it.

Forcing himself not to show how that thought rankled him, Ryoken kept his voice even and cold as he spoke. “I don’t know why you’re trying to kill me, but you’ve got the wrong person—”

“Kogami Ryoken.” With green eyes narrowed, the pilot cut him off. “Nineteen years old in 2019. Graduated at the top of his high school class but did not apply to any universities. Currently residing above the Count Down electronic repairs shop his cousin owns.”

Alright, so he had the right guy. But Ryoken hadn’t _done_ anything anyone would want to kill him for. 

“Whatever you think I did, I didn’t do—”

The pilot, shockingly, agreed. “Correct.”

Ryoken didn’t understand what was happening. Feeling lost and sore and pissed as hell, he slowly asked, “So, can you put the gun down…?”

“You haven’t done it _yet._ ” There was an immense amount of venom injected into the final, emphasized word. “I have come back from the year 2066 to prevent your crimes, Kogami Ryoken.”

“ _What?_ What crimes? 2066?” Fifty years in the future? It was a bold claim, but then again, _giant robot._

None of this made any sense. But dying confused and helpless wasn’t his style. Ryoken forced himself to calm down and think, remembering everything that occurred earlier. Despite seeming his determination to get at Ryoken, the pilot had been careful to damage only property in his seemingly mad rampage. He’d even taken care to avoid the family that had fallen in his path. Didn’t that show at least some respect for innocent lives?

Couldn’t he use that to his advantage? “Are you really going to shoot me dead without even explaining why first?”

Blinking in surprise, the pilot seemed to consider that. For a moment, he stared at Ryoken very seriously with his brow furrowed.

After a moment, the gun lowered. “I suppose you are owed that much.” The pilot snapped his fingers.

In sync, every monitor in the store changed with a flash of light: walls of plasma TVs suddenly switching from high definition panoramics to static. Left behind were images of wastelands and bodies, all ravaged and marked with dust and blood. The camera panned from them to the monument they laid before, an immense statue of a man Ryoken didn’t recognize standing over them in what could only be called triumph.

The plaque before the monument read a simple, maddening sentence: _In commemoration of Lord Kogami Ryoken’s first great conquest and the completion of the Tower of Hanoi._

“What the—”

“That’s you.” The pilot said unhelpfully, pointing at the statue. “In 2066, you are the most infamous and feared man in history, the Supreme Overlord of the entire world, responsible for the deaths of millions across the globe and the end of freedom.”

“...supreme overlord?” He must have heard that wrong. Or he was seriously crazy and from the start, this had all been an extremely bizarre hallucination. Because that was way too stupid. 

“Supreme Overlord.” The pilot repeated, then hefted the gun back up. “Now that you understand why you must die—”

Staring down the barrel, Ryoken wanted very much to pull his hair out and yell until his voice echoed through the whole mall. “Like hell I understand!” He was even more confused! “Are you saying _I conquer the planet_?”

Frowning, the pilot pulled the gun back slightly. He looked between Ryoken and the monitors with a dubious expression. “Do you need to watch the footage again?”

“No!” The visual demonstration hadn’t made any sense either! “Why would I conquer the planet? _How_ would I?”

“I don’t see what is so difficult to understand.” The pilot said dully, and the gun was back in place, unwavering. “But it doesn’t matter. I am going to kill you now.”

"Hold on—"

"Excuse me." A polite, but smarmy voice interrupted them, and both their heads swiveled to the side. Without either of them noticing, someone else had appeared in the store, even though Ryoken was facing the entrance and hadn't seen  _anyone_ come inside—then again, he was also a little occupied. 

The new arrival was dressed in white with hair that almost matched, with only his blue eyes carrying any color, and smiled at them both.

Ryoken had no idea who he was, but he got the feeling that this guy was a smug fucker. He could just  _tell._

“Spectre.” The pilot hissed, whipping around to aim the gun at the newcomer. And then he blinked, and turned right back to Ryoken, indecision clear on his face. The gun swayed back and forth between them, obviously considering which was a bigger threat.

“Yusaku-kun.” The stranger, Spectre, apparently, greeted. "I hate to interrupt, but that's my Lord you're assassinating."

Lord?

He meant Ryoken, right?

No way.

Spectre reached up very casually, revealing he held a book of sorts in his hand, and used the spine to nudge the gun to the side as he stepped up to Ryoken. "It's lovely to meet you, Revolver-sama. I am Spectre, your humble servant from 2066."

_No fucking way._


End file.
